Lawrence Halprin, influential landscape architect who designed Heritage Park Plaza in Fort Worth

By JOHN KING

San Francisco Chronicle

SAN FRANCISCO — Lawrence Halprin, the San Francisco Bay Area landscape architect who pushed the design of America’s urban spaces in new directions over a 60-year career, died Sunday of natural causes. He was 93.

He left his mark at all scales, from the crafting of San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square in the 1960s to the transformation of the 52-acre base of Yosemite Falls that was completed in 2005.

Mr. Halprin’s best-known national work is the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, a saga that began when he won a design competition in 1976 but wasn’t completed until the memorial opened in 1997.

"He was the single most influential landscape architect of the postwar years," said Charles Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation. "He redefined the profession’s role in cities."

He also left his mark on Fort Worth, designing Heritage Park Plaza in the late 1960s at West Bluff and Main Streets downtown. It was built in 1977 and is considered a top example of a 1970s urban water park.

Public access was cut off in 2007, and today Heritage Park Plaza is on the lists of Texas’ Most Endangered Historic Places and Historic Fort Worth’s Most Endangered Places. A $1.5 million fundraising campaign is under way to reopen the park.

Mr. Halprin’s personality was as exuberant as the cascading water features found in many of his parks — whether it was his 1969 arrest to protest a flood-control project on Tamalpais Creek in Marin County or his 1968 pronouncement that if a fountain by Armand Vaillancourt in Mr. Halprin’s large plaza at the foot of San Francisco’s Market Street didn’t turn out to be one of the nation’s "great works of civic art . . . I am going to slit my throat."

Not all of Mr. Halprin’s work was embraced by the public. Vaillancourt Fountain, with its contorted concrete piping, remains controversial. Spaces he designed in several cities have been altered or closed, and his United Nations Plaza on Market Street is known more for social problems than its sculptural air.

But Mr. Halprin’s ambitious desire to reshape cities earned him lasting respect from other designers.

"When he hit it, he hit it, and you can’t say that for any of his peers," said Frank Gehry, America’s best-known living architect, who designed the 1986 exhibition on Mr. Halprin’s career at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Lawrence Halprin was born in Brooklyn on July 1, 1916 . His mother, Rose, was an advocate of a Jewish state in what was then Palestine, and in 1933 she took her son to Palestine, where they spent two years helping establish a kibbutz near Haifa.

In 1940, Mr. Halprin, a horticulture student at the University of Wisconsin, married Anna Schuman, a dancer and fellow student who became his creative as well as marital partner.

It was Anna who suggested that they take a weekend trip to see Taliesin, the home of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

"Having been at Taliesin and having listened to Mr. Wright play the piano and talk a little bit . . . that’s what I wanted to be," Mr. Halprin reminisced during a talk in 2007 to the American Society of Landscape Architects at its convention in San Francisco.

The young couple moved east when Mr. Halprin entered Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, but in 1943 he left school to enlist in the Navy. The Halprins settled in the Bay Area after the war. He opened his own firm in 1949.

Staff writer Sandra Baker contributed to this report.

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